For the past 50 years, since the first Dodge Charger took to the streets in 1966, Americans have enjoyed an obsession with power, performance and style. The ‘66 Dodge Charger was a flat-out menace on the asphalt, and a game-changer in a hyper-competitive segment and era. With the foundation firmly in place, Dodge Charger continued to grow in size and stature, year after year, always striving for cutting-edge design, awe-inspiring interiors, and performance and capability that broke boundaries with each new iteration of the iconic vehicle.

In this five-part series, the Redline Dodge Blog is looking back at five landmark models in the Dodge Charger’s 50-year history. We started with the 1968, 1969, 1970 and 2006 Dodge Charger. Today, in our final blog post in the series, we’re focusing on the 2016 Dodge Charger SRT® Hellcat.

Strap on your safety belts and prepare to be pressed back into your seat.

The 2016 Dodge Charger SRT® Hellcat: Interior, Exterior and Engine

Inside and outside, the 2016 Dodge SRT® Hellcat is a sight to behold — if you can catch a glimpse of it racing by, that is. From the sporty, refined interior to the supercharged 6.2L HEMI® SRT Hellcat V8 engine, every detail of this road warrior is designed for comfort and performance.

Even at a standstill, the 2016 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat looks like it’s ready to sprint from the line. The SRT Hellcat front fender badging puts the competition on notice, and the aluminum hood featuring air extractors astride a center NACA duct is both functional for cooling and bold in style.

If you thought the 2016 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat looked like a beast on wheels, just wait until you feel the power under the hood. The supercharged 6.2L HEMI V8 pushes muscle to its very limit, exerting a monstrous 707 horsepower and 650 lb-ft of torque. All of that power is routed to the rear wheels via a TorqueFlite® eight-speed automatic transmission that’s been enhanced with additional pinion gears and five additional clutch pack discs.

To harness all that power, the Charger SRT Hellcat features performance-tuned steering to give the driver good vehicle response and increased ease of maneuverability in tight spaces. Further, the three-mode Bilstein® adaptive dampening suspension works to put the driver in full control no matter the conditions. The Brembo® ultra high-performance brake system boasts monster-sized 15.4-inch two-piece rotors that work with six-piston calipers on the front, and 13.8-inch rear discs for incredible stopping power.

For those who believe driving can be an art form, the interior of the 2016 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat has been designed for comfort and style, with dark satin accents, and engineered for road-ready confidence and control. The SRT flat-bottom steering wheel with gunmetal accents is designed to fit firmly in the palms of your hands, and the 7-inch customizable driver information digital cluster display delivers real-time information. To flex some serious muscle on the interior, the 2016 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat features a 200-mph speedometer.

Speaking of high speeds and harnessing power, the 2016 Dodge SRT® Hellcat comes with two key fobs — a black key fob that restricts power to 500 horsepower and a red key fob that unlocks the full 707 horsepower of the supercharged 6.2L HEMI® SRT Hellcat V8 engine.

Power, performance, style — after 50 years of the Charger, the 2016 Dodge Charger SRT® Hellcat still represents the principles of the original and continues to define the muscle sedan. We can’t wait to see what the next 50 years of Charger brings.

Learn more about the history of the Dodge Charger at the Redline Dodge Blog, and check out the current lineup at dodge.com.

The 2015 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat unleashes a ludicrous 707 horsepower from its supercharged 6.2-liter V-8 to offer mad acceleration — the kind of white-knuckled blast of speed that’s not for the timid. The Charger SRT Hellcat, along with its coupe stablemate the Challenger SRT Hellcat, is a straight-line beast that’s very much at home on the drag strip, though it’s not too shabby on a road course either. Plus, it doesn’t fail to impress people you pass on the street.

Last year we tracked the then-new 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat coupe down the quarter-mile to the tune of 11.41 seconds. While we came short of Dodge’s quarter-mile claim of 11.2 seconds, there was no doubting the capability was there waiting to be unleashed.

The Charger is even faster in Hellcat form. Drag strip durability testing was also built into the rocket ship masquerading as a family sedan’s development program. The automaker says the Charger Hellcat can run the quarter-mile in a ridiculously quick 11.0 seconds on factory tires. Few unmodified cars can make that kind of claim.

We set out to see how close we could get to 11.0 seconds with a factory-fresh 2015 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat and drag strip rental of Byron Dragway in Byron, Ill.

Like the Challenger, the biggest obstacle is the rear-wheel-drive Charger simply wants to obliterate the relatively skinny, hard-sidewall street tires when trying to lay 700-plus horsepower to the ground. Our Charger was equipped with optional $195 Pirelli P Zero 275/40R20 summer tires, though that is by no means a solution to harness the Hellcat’s excessive horsepower and torque.

The quickest pass of the day came after 13 attempts of tweaking the launch, burnout, starting line preparation, electronic driving modes and tire pressure. After all that work we were rewarded with a blistering run of 11.03 seconds at 126.61 mph. It would be an understatement to say the car proved tricky to drive on its factory tires and a lie to say it was anything but a thrill to see those numbers pop up on the track’s timing board.

Getting to 11.03 seconds was no easy feat despite the Charger only coming with an automatic transmission — often easier to drag race than a manual — and our near-perfect track and weather conditions. We were lucky to have mid-50-degree temperatures rushing cool air through the V-8’s cooling systems and track conditions fit for cars much faster than the Hellcat. The drag strip’s track surface was prepped in various ways to assist tire grip, a normal drag strip practice. Along with the 11.03-second pass, we also ran 11.09 seconds and a number of 11.1-second passes.

There wasn’t a single lightbulb-over-the-head moment when clicking off the 11.03-second pass. It took a combination of tweaks, starting with the burnout. Our best run with the tires at factory pressure was 11.27 seconds before we dropped the tires to 25 pounds per square inch. Getting the right amount of heat in the tires proved to be imperative. The best burnout sequence included clicking the paddle shifters quickly to 3rd gear once the tires started roasting and waiting for tire smoke to show in the rearview mirror before riding out the burnout to just before the starting line to minimize tire temperatures loses. Anything higher or lower than a 160-degree tire temperature and we experienced falloff in bite.

The Hellcat’s electronic gadgetry sequence that worked best for our runs included switching the electronic stability system from Off during the burnout to Sport before launching. Sport mode gave the best balance of traction management and forward momentum compared with the Street and Track modes. The suspension’s softest Street mode provided the best weight transfer to the rear, and the transmission was left in automatic shifting but in the Track setting.

Getting the Charger Hellcat out of the hole was best accomplished by leaving the line as smoothly as possible from idle by gently squeezing the pedal before rolling into wide-open throttle at roughly the 60-foot mark on the drag strip; a drag strip’s timing system measure distance in intervals of 60 feet, 330 feet, an eighth-mile, 1,000 feet and a quarter-mile. Lower 60-foot times are a good indication of how well the car is leaving the starting line. The 1.77 seconds of the 11.03 run was bested by a 1.72-second 60-foot later in the day, but that run was botched when the tires let loose on the 2nd-gear shift, ending what could have been a glorious 10-second pass. It was the one that got away.

Our run of 11.03 seconds in the quarter-mile is insane for a sedan you can buy straight off the showroom floor. For that kind of hellacious acceleration the $63,290 starting price seems reasonable.

The 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat is the most powerful muscle car of all time, with a supercharged 6.2L Hellcat Hemi producing a bone chilling 707 horsepower and 650 lb-ft of torque, according to the official marketing materials.

From the time that the first media outlets got hold of the Hellcat Challenger, it looked as though the 707/650 figures were a bit underrated; and the owner of the 2015 Challenger SRT Hellcat in the video below wanted to see just how much power his new Mopar muscle car made in stock form, so he took it to a dyno shop for a baseline dyno run and for tuning – tuning which turned out some incredible numbers.

The 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat shown below in Sublime Green is owned by Ohio resident John Michael Hansen. Mr. Hansen is no stranger to high performance vehicles; his current garage is occupied by a Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT, a built Lancer Evolution X, a built Nissan GTR, a built MKIV Toyota Supra, and a supercharged Ram 1500 SRT10.

Aside from the Jeep, all of John’s cars are modified and all of them are supercharged, so it should come as no surprise that this horsepower junkie was one of the first people in line when the 2015 Challenger Hellcat went on sale.

Once Mr. Hansen took delivery of his 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat, he took it to Accelerated Performance to see just how much power it made in factory stock form. The 2015 Hellcat Challenger in the video below made 646 horsepower and 585lb-ft of torque at the rear wheels; considering the official power numbers of 707hp and 650lb-ft of torque at the crankshaft, Hansen’s Hellcat is losing only about 9% of the power between the engine and the wheels, which is a clear indication that the car is indeed underrated or that the Hellcat Challenger has an extremely efficient automatic transmission, as most self-shifting cars lose at least 12% of their power at the wheels.

After getting a baseline dyno reading on his 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat, John Michael Hansen had Torrie McPhail of Unleashed Tuning see how much extra power they could squeeze from the stock Hellcat. Using an HPTuners tuning tool, McPhail was able to increase the output at the wheels from 646hp and 585lb-ft of torque to 680 horsepower and 616 torque.

With no other modifications, simply tuning the stock computer to optimize performance allowed Mr. Hansen’s Hellcat Challenger to pick up 34 horsepower and 31 lb-ft of torque at the rear wheels. Provided that we use the somewhat comical 9% drivetrain loss that we calculated above, this Challenger is making no less than 740 horsepower and 671 lb-ft of torque at the motor…from a car with no modifications and a simple engine computer tune.

Those are high stock numbers to begin with, and amazing tuned numbers for the 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat; and with Mr. Hansen planning to do more to his new Mopar muscle car, we could see even bigger numbers from this Sublime beast in the coming months. In the meantime, crank up your speakers and fall in love with the roar of this tuned Hellcat on the dyno.

Allpar member “redriderbob” wrote that he spoke with Tim Kuniskis at the Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat launch; Mr. Kiniskis, who heads Dodge, said that the SRT brand structure is too confusing with SRT Core models, Super Bees, special edition packages on Charger, and such; it is difficult for the customer to know what kind of models they are looking at, and it is hard for sales staff at dealerships to learn the chaos.

According to the member, the Super Bee’s last year will be 2014, and he is “aligning the Charger and Challenger options to be identical.” The Super Bee and Core will be replaced by the Scat Pack 392, which “adds more content at a lower, more affordable price for the customer. It will be the best value four-door muscle car on the market.”

When asked if the days of the 392 were limited, he stated, “Absolutely not! People that don’t have the need for the extreme power of the Hellcat, but want a great handling muscle car with great power will be able to have the regular SRT392 model. There will be enough content in both Charger and Challenger SRT 392 models to keep them very separate and desirable for the customer who wants it.”

When asked why Dodge had not said much about 2015 Chargers other than the R/T and police pursuit editions, Mr. Kuniskis said they wanted to fully focus on the launch of the 2015 Dodge Challenger, and that the rest of the Charger lineup would be unveiled in the next month or so. All Chargers other than Hellcat (slated for January production) will be available by the end of the year.